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Archive for the ‘Future Trends’ Category

Jack Uldrich

#1: By the end of 2010, one-third of all automotive ads will focus exclusively on software-driven features that emphasize future car’s ability to interpret, react and connect to the external environment. Far less emphasis will be placed on car’s physical appearance and performance.

#2: One 4-year college will decrease its tuition by more than 5% in 2010 citing growing pressure from online universities; 10 universities will follow Princeton’s lead and begin distributing e-Books (such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader) to incoming students; and at least 100 other colleges and universities will follow Boston University’s lead in eliminating email addresses for incoming freshmen.

#3: The sale of solar cells will grow faster than expected due to innovations in new financing models that minimize or eliminate altogether the large up-front costs currently associated with installing solar modules.

#4: The first fully robotic vehicle will become operational in Iraq and Afghanistan and will successfully deliver military supplies more than 25 miles without the aid of any humans.

#5: A socially-networked song in which none of the band members knew one another prior to the song’s release will become a Billboard Top Ten hit. The band will attempt to conduct a conventional tour but will soon breakup citing “artistic differences.” The real cause: they find they just don’t like one another.

#6:The first cyborg soldier—with above average human capabilities in terms of strength, speed and/or vision—will return to active duty. Nicknamed “Steve Austin” by his fellow soldiers; the technology inside “the bionic man” (or bionic woman) will cost far less than 6 million dollars.

#7: An amateur scientist using cheap supercomputers accessed through “the cloud” will make a major scientific discovery. Her discovery will have initially been dismissed by peer-reviewed journals but hailed by the growing number of “open-science” advocates.

#8: A full two years before its first-ever “Space Tourism” launch, Galactic Suite Ltd will lower the price of its three-day trip to space from $4.4 million to $2 million.

#9: A physician in India will perform a prostectonomy on a patient in a different country using only a high-speed Internet connection and da Vinci robotic surgical device. The “medical tourist” in Sri Lanka will return to the United States the following day.

#10: A new iPhone app will be created which overlays a “Nascar-like” suit over the images of Congressmen and other prominent politicians to reveal from whom they are receiving campaign contributions. The size of the “patch” will vary according to the amount of campaign contributions they have received from the organization. The new app will bring heightened attention to the burgeoning field of augmented reality.

#11: An RFID chip embedded in the arm of an elderly Alzheimer patient will be credited with saving the man from freezing to death after he strolled away from his residence in the middle of the night and became disoriented.

#12: A leading concrete company will call for a ban on carbon dioxide emissions from concrete because its nanotechnology-enable concrete will be certified as a “CO2 neutral.”

#13: Hype surround algae’s promise as the “bio-fuel of the future” will grow hot after a breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology. Environmental advocates, however, will draw parallels between the advent of the “designer bacteria” (which is used to convert algae into fuel) and the creation of genetically modified organisms. The issue of “Frankenbugs” will gain traction in the media.

#14: Mind-control toys will grow from a small niche product in 2009 to the latest “must-have” toy by the 2010 holiday season. The technology will sell very well among kids under the age of 10 and seniors over the age of 65. Interest in brain-neural technology will also be driven by plummeting prices and increased product performance.

#15: Synthetically grown diamonds will make their way into the commercial marketplace but the diamond industry will have no ability to discern the products from “natural” diamonds. The diamond industry will attempt to downplay the significance of the event but will quietly ramp up efforts to regulate and control the creation of synthetic diamonds.

#16: A robotic pet that also serves as a companion, watch dog, vacuum cleaner and a personal healthcare monitor will be unveiled in Japan and marketed to the seniors. Voice recognition technology inside the robot will also be able to detect if a person”s speech is slurring and will connect to a healthcare professional immediately.

#17: The cost of sequencing an individual’s genome will drop to less than $1000. The breakthrough will lead to the creation of a rash of new social networking sites around different genetic dispositions in order to deal with the avalanche of genetic information. Genetic counseling will become one of the fastest growing professions in the coming decade.

#18: The growing sophistication of language translational software (available on such platforms as Google Wave) will cause leading corporations to revisit some job descriptions which currently require candidates to speak two languages. Citing the technology’s ability to facilitate conversations with native speakers, the city of Paris will become an even more popular tourist destination.

#19: A conservative state legislator will introduce legislation prohibiting healthy individuals (i.e. non-injured combat veterans) from using implanted brain-neural technology to control objects outside their body. The bill will die in committee but the author and other supporters vow to make it a campaign issue in 2010.

#20: Technology artisans will begin using inexpensive rapid prototype manufacturing equipment to develop new pieces of art and jewelry of previously unseen sophistication, complexity and beauty. More traditional artisans will ask that “non hand-made” products be banned from local art fairs.

The “Back to the Future” Prediction of 2010: A barefoot runner will win a major marathon and fuel a growing trend among recreational runners to run without shoes.

Dom Sagolla

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38: “oh this going to be addictive.”

We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball.  The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “10958″ as our shortcode. (We later changed to “40404″ for ease of use and memorability.) @Florian was commuting from Germany, so in order to operate with him we secured a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway.  Twttr probably had about 50 users in the 10958 days.

I was following everyone on the system. We had an admin page where you could see every user. As Head of Quality for the company, it seemed like my duty to watch for opinions or issues from our users. This caused confusion, though, when family members of our team were suddenly being followed by a seemingly random person. Thus, Private Accounts were born. @Jack and @Florian created a means for users to mark themselves private, and we admins had the ability to tell who wanted to be private so we’d know not to follow them. Actual, real privacy with secure protection came a bit later. I’d say there were about 100 users when Private was invented.

The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message. In February of 2007 @Jack wrote something which inspired me to get started on this project: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Just in time for SxSW, @RayReadyRay rigged a very sweet Flash-based visualizer that ended up on display on the halls of the conference. I wasn’t working there, but I used to visit regularly to see how our baby was doing. I happened to be at the office in SF when the visualizer went live on site in Austin. I remember finding a bug just before showtime, as @Biz and @Jeremy talked over the phone. Everything miraculously fell into place by the time people filtered out of the sessions to see their comments floating along the hallway screens.

Boom #1: Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and @Jack thanked everyone in 140 characters.  MTV Music Awards: Boom #2.  Apple WWDC 2007, and then TV, and then print and pretty soon Cable news: Boom #3.

@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.

For a lot of people, the entire API launch was really the time when Twitter first left the nest. But that is another story, for another time.

 Trend #1: Smart Materials

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I agree and so if you want to see the future of “smart materials,” I’d strongly encourage you to watch this short video about General Motor’s work in the field. (I know, I know … GM is now in bankrupcy but that doesn’t minimize its work in this exciting field.)

Within the next few years a number of cars will possess body parts—such as air dams and handles—made out of shape memory alloys. Self-cleaning glass and scratch-resistant panels will also become the norm. Slightly longer term, self-healing rubber — such as BASF is developing—will be incorporated into cars.

The full text of this article is available at JumpTheCurve.net